I was happy today to bump into a few people I haven't seen in a while. Don Box is at MIX to give a talk tomorrow with Steve Maine on "Navigating the Programmable Web" .

Danny Thorpe blogs about a MIX session about a windows Live technology that is SO secret that the sesison title and abstract are not in the MIX session list.

the buzz is building about the "secret session" that isn't listed on any of the printed schedules, nor on the billboard at the room entrance.  We unequivocally cannot confirm or deny that it may or may not be scheduled at 11:45 in room Lando 4204, entitled "Windows Live Data services" and presented by the devlive team's king of privacy paranoia, Yaron Goland.  We deny any involvement in annotating the room signage with a sharpie of unknown origin. 

The session is real, but it was withheld from the printed matter to avoid showing our hand too early.  It is actually listed in the online schedule.  I can't tell you about it (yet), but it should be a knockout session.  Maybe not quite as sexy as spinning video cube Silverlight eye candy, but I'm sure it'll get a rise out of the true data diehards who manage to actually find this session.

his post is also a fun read on hanging out in the speaker lounge with Anders Hejlsberg, and chatting with folks like John Lam and Miguel de Icaza. He refers to them as power hitters. Perhaps he doesn't realize that he's considered one of them!

Silverlight does INK! Yay. I've been asking about it for a while thinking it was the next natural step. I actually have played with it a bit and have a little app that I wrote that I need to deploy with the GoLive license. This is with the 1.0 version of Silverlight so it is all javascript against the InkPresenter XAML object. This also means that it is very different than coding against the Tablet PC API. However with the .NET runtime support for Silverlight that will change.

The InkPresenter has a StrokeCollection, just like we are familiar with in the Ink API. And then you drill into each individual stroke and even stylus points. With the stylus point data not only can you redisplay the ink in XAML, but you can redraw it and you can do so in real time (eg at the same speed that it was originally drawn in.

The way you interact with the user drawing ink via the javascript is by responding to mousedown, mousemove and mouseup events. Billy Hollis recognized this as how he worked with ink before we had the Ink APIs. It's a little frustrating to have to work at this low level but it's very interesting and i have a lot of flexibility. However, I do look forward to the .NET runtime implementation!

As always, my key interest is in persisting the ink. This can be done in XAML (you have to iterate through the ink structure and create the XAML, a function which can be encapsulated of course) and the CreateFromXAML javascript function will deserialize the XAML back into the inkdata that can be fed into the InkPresenter.

This is a pretty high level description and I'll explain more of the guts of what I have done in a later post as well as have a screencast available while I deal with getting the golive version on the web.

In the meantime, check out Gavin Gear's blog - he is a Program Manager on the tablet team and has done some amazing work with ink in Silverlight. Along with Sam George, he gets to show off a very cool demo tomorrow that they wrote. There are some live examples in the Silverlight gallery as well.

From Gavin's blog

Want to check out a Silverlight Ink sample? Check out “Ink Tattoo Studio” and “Page Turn” here:
http://silverlight.net/community/communitygallery.aspx

Also, I know that Loren Heiny , who has always been a great innovator with tablet pc development, is playing with this stuff too. So keep an eye on his blog as well.

In Pablo Castro's session today, I noticed a link on the resource page to his own blog. I have never known that Pablo (tech lead on the ADO.NET team) had a blog and couldn't believe that I could have missed such a thing. Luckily there is wireless available at the conference so I immediately browsed to the blog and lo and behold, he had made his first post just today! It is on the Astoria Web Data Services.

http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/

I was wondering what "data services in the cloud" ... Pablo Castro's Mix Session, was going to be about.

Project Astoria exposes data that is exposed through the Entity Framework. So you build your EDM and then the service sits on top of htat.

It is two way... you can use HTTP PUT, POST and DELETE.

Here is a post on the ADO.NET team blog about the project Astoria, that is the web data services.

I'm in Pablo's talk right now, but you can check out the project here  and the blog post here.

The second one is called Jasper which is for purely data driven apps. I'm looking forward to Sam Druker's talk on this on Wednesday. Read the blog post here.

Next announcement from Scott Guthrie in the MIX keynote is that Microsoft has created a Ruby implementation for .NET called IronRuby.

I'm looking at another SilverLight demo wiht xaml file that has a IronRuby code file as it's app source.

Scott Guthrie just mentioned (in the MIX keynote) that LINQ will be in Silverlight which means that browser based apps can grab data from the server and do LINQ queries on the client side.

Silverlight is definitely the darling of MIX so far!

ScottGu describes SilverLight as three parts.

We've seen the media capabilities of silverlight. That's the first chunk of it.

The second is the .NET capabilites of the run time ... from ScottGu's lips "a cross platform runtime of the .NEt Framework".

(IT IS ON THE WEB RIGHT NOW as Silverlight 1.1 Alpha!!!! Note that the Silverlight 1.0 Beta is also released today. 1.0 does not have the .NET run time but it does have a goLive license.)

The third is a new service called silverlight Streaming. You can push your silverlight assets (media etc. up to 4GB) onto a Microsoft server and it will push it out to your websites for you so you don't have to worry about server capabilities or getting slash-dotted.  (This of course will scare people... about putting their code on Microsoft's servers... but that's another story..)

Rray Ozzie just announced that Expression Studio is shipping today. All MIX attendees will be getting "a special commorative edition".

Right now Silverlight (wpf/e) is not for the feint of heart - lots of javascript coding involved.

But Ray Ozzie just announced (as I'm sitting here in the keynote) at MIX that Silverlight will support .NET as a first class .NET development environment. So you can develop silverlight apps in .NEt. This means that the silverlight  runtime will include .NEt. And since sliverlight is targetted at macs also this means that .NET will run on Macs. I'm assuming that this will be a subset of .NET, but ..... pretty cool.

Mike Pizzo writes a post about Microsoft's data access strategy that covers a few important things:

1) Announces that EF will not make it into the Orcas release but will ship "A few months after the shipment of Orcas, and within the first half of 2008". This plan will allow them to give us more than what they would be able to give us in the initial Orcas release.
2) Addresses the LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework question, which has been asked quite a lot.

READ MORE HERE

[A New DevLife Post]
 

I just checked the Las Vegas forecast for the next week as I head out for MIX tomorrow.. But I know mostly I have to dress for indoors and a/c.

Wally is wondering which of the two possible covers might work for an upcoming book.

I thought I'd help him out by make the decision a little harder.

Mike Taulty has been doing short screen casts about LINQ to SQL. I love his approach as I know from experience how difficult it is to try to give a decent presentation of LINQ to SQL in a single 90 minute session when you have to start from scratch.

There are 9 so far and more coming. Here is a link to the latest (that includes links to the first 8 as well). Stay tuned for more.

From the ADO.NET Team blog:

Late last week, after bits had been finalized, we found a bug in the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Wizard that shipped with Visual Studio “Orcas” beta 1. The problem has now been corrected.

Please download and install the patch available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f69e9eb8-0ebd-4fba-a4cc-2050297ba75b&displaylang=en to fix the problem.

Panel on Open Source in the Microsoft Community at DevTeach

www.devteach.com

I have been futzing with WPF/E today trying to get the concepts down and when I looked up, I saw a post from Mike Taulty that said telerik has Silverlight radControls!

The "blimey" comes from MIke, because the relative American exlamation is R-rated!

www.telerik.com/silverlight

Very cool demos.

It took me a while to figure out how to get the WPF/E project template into Visual Studio 2005. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

In their Q1 release, telerik is including the first release of telerik Reporting. With my well-documented, love/hate relationship with Crystal Reports, I was definitely eager to see telerik's implementation. Telerik is all about simplicity (of use) and design. So this first pass at Reporting has some really great mechanisms for formatting reports in a CSS-like manner, which I really like. Another big win for me over Crystal is that while Crystal has evolved into a .NET tool, telerik's was designed in .NET. So you can interact with all of the controls in the report in the same manner as any other control in .NET.

Another benefit is the ease of using the reports in a winform or a webform. The only thing I know that is different is that the webforms don't support multi-column reports.

While there are definitely some more complex things I can achieve in Crystal (and I have the scars to prove it) that I can't yet do in this first version of telerik Reporting, I expect great things to come of this tool as we see it growing over future releases.

On top of all of this, I'm happy that I can actually copy and paste more than one control at a time.

There's a lot more to see in there. Check out the download. You can also download the extensive help files.

I watched a short interview with Scott Guthrie and learned some interesting things about ASP.NET (such as it is the technology behind MySpace's 4 BILLION page views a day)... read more...

[A New DevLife Post]